Peach Jasmine Dragon Pearl Green Tea has a similar appearance with Superfine Jasmine Downy Dragon Pearls Green Tea and Premium Jasmine Dragon Pearls Green Tea. The making skills of them are also similar. After the tea makers rolled the tea leaves into small pearl shape, they will mix the natural extractives from peach into the tea pearls. This fruity Dragon Pearl will make you feel like have actually eaten a peach.

TeaVivre also provides brewing instructions for using a 3 oz Gaiwan. In case you aren't familiar with what a Gaiwan is, it is a Chinese lidded bowl used for brewing and drinking tea. I can't go into Gaiwan style brewing much yet because it isn't a style I am overly familiar with, I typically brew western style in a tea pot.

Serving Size: 4g

Water Temp: 185°

Steep Time: rinse, 15s, 20, 30s, 40s, 1min

Review:

First off, I would like to thank Angel at TeaVivre for sending me these samples. She was incredibly generous in the amount of tea she sent me last month and I hope you will all look forward to reading about the wonderful teas she has provided me with. I will be featuring a different tea each Tuesday throughout June.

Before I begin my review I want to give you a word of advice when measuring this tea. TeaVivre provides several different instructions for brewing their teas, as well as two different methods of measurement. I would suggest using the weight of the tea (in grams) over a standard teaspoon when measuring for more accurate results. When I tried using a teaspoon I ended up using half as much tea as the measurement in grams called for. I typically find that dragon pearls, due to their shape, are impossible to measure accurately with a teaspoon. If you have a kitchen scale I would highly recommend using it.

I typically prepare my tea western style in a ceramic tea pot. For this review I used 7 grams of tea, prepared 3 steeps at 1m, 2m, and 3m. Subsequent steeps were done at varying times to see what provided the most enjoyable flavor.

My first steep of this tea was very light in both color and taste. I had difficulty tasting the jasmine, but there was a very subtle sweetness from the peach. What I love about this was that this tea tastes like a genuine peach, and is in fact the only peach tea I can say that about. TeaVivre states on their website that this tea is mixed with the natural extractives from peach which are added to the tea pearls to obtain such a genuine peach flavor.

The jasmine pearls were just beginning to unfurl in my pot on my second steep, releasing more flavor into this cup. It was noticeably darker and tasted more like a green tea. I still can't taste the jasmine in this steep, but the peach flavor has gotten slightly stronger. There is also a bit of astringency this time, but nothing that would make this cup undrinkable.

I noticed that the astringency was much stronger in subsequent steeps. Ultimately I steeped this six times with fairly pleasing results, although I found that I preferred the taste of the cups that steeped for less time. After the first three steeps I started to play around more. I went back to shorter steep times in order to minimize the astringency in each cup.

Since I decided that I enjoyed the cups with a shorter steep time I opened a second sample pack and played around with my steep times. This time I started at 1m and increased my time 15s each steep, so my times were 1m, 1m15s, 1m30s, 1m45s, 2m, 2m15s. I think that for my tastes these times work best for me. I also think that it may be possible to steep more than six times this way and still end up with an enjoyable tea. It was already after midnight when I got to this point so I stopped.

Ultimately if you purchase this tea you'll want to experiment a little to find your perfect steeping times. I find that I enjoy my teas with less astringency although some of you may prefer the bite it gives the tea.

One last thing I want to mention is that this tea is truly amazing when served cold. The peach is less subtle than it was while hot and I noticed the sweetness more. Because I ended up doing back to back steeps of three sample packages for this review I ended up with about 18 cups of tea, most of which ended up in my fridge at the end of the night. I mixed everything together, chilled it over night, and have been drinking it all day (and will be for the next few).

Would I order this again? Absolutely. I'm a huge fan of floral teas and peach teas so I was half in love with this one before I even opened the package. It has been a very long time since I've had jasmine pearls and these do not disappoint.

Disclosure:

In an effort to be open with my readers I want to let you know that this sample was provided to me free of charge by TeaVivre for my review. As always, all opinions are my own. If you are a company and would like to send me an item for review feel free to drop me an email.